DO you expect to be consulted before your neighbour puts up a whopping conservatory stretching deep into his back garden, shutting out the evening sun?

Or would you be shocked to suddenly find a 6ft high, humming broadband box outside your gate – with no warning that the engineers were about to move in?

What about your child’s school converting to an academy, setting its own curriculum and teaching hours and answerable to the distant Education Secretary, without any parent having a say?

And if a government is making all these changes – the last came in long ago, the first two are planned – than how it can boast of a commitment to “localism”?

The question needs to be asked after David Cameron’s latest attempts to kick-start the economy. The Prime Minister – leading what wags call “the Conservatory Party” – vowed to get the “planners off our backs” by allowing extensions of up to eight metres without planning permission, for a limited period.

There was astonishment at threats to strip the power to decide planning applications from any council found guilty of taking too long to make decisions – or of making the wrong ones.

These powers would be handed to a centralised planning inspectorate, on the say-so of Eric Pickles – a man not exactly renowned for sound, restrained judgment during his combustible time as Communities Secretary.

Meanwhile, councils will not longer be able to require developers to provide a proportion of affordable homes in any development.

Many criticised the planning “free-for-all”

for missing its target. They insisted that it was a lack of affordable mortgages from the bombed-out banks, rather than town hall obstruction, which was preventing the housing market from moving.

Regardless of that debate, this latest example of Whitehall stomping over local decision- making is surely the death knell for all those boasts of devolving power?

It is remarkable how the coalition has been able to cling to its claim of localism, even as ministers flexed their muscles in education, health and economic development.

Regardless of whether the One NorthEast development agency was brilliant or bungling, its demise saw vital responsibilities for investment, job-creation and business support lost to London.

And now thousands of new academies answer to a single man – the Education Secretary – while the NHS shake-up has created the daddy of all central quangos in the National Commissioning Board.

It is never easy to decide where the national need should trump the local view. For example, I support high-speed rail – which involves crushing fierce opposition in the Chilterns.

But the reality is that all governments, whatever they promise, end up gobbling up more powers – including this one.

MICHAEL GOVE, the aforementioned Education Secretary, faced the music yesterday over the GCSE marking fiasco – and North-West Durham MP Pat Glass was waiting for him. At the education select committee, she warned the row was “not going to go away”, adding: “Children’s lives have been damaged by this.”

Mr Gove would have expected a hard time if he’d spotted an earlier tweet from her.

It read: “Waiting to question Michael Gove on GCSE Eng Lang fiasco. He had better have a book down his trousers!”